computer gaming

Voice chat company Vivox has been able to find a great niche, gamers. According to Monty Sharma, vice president of product management and marketing at Vivox, they have been adding users at a rate of 2.5 million a month. And people are spending 3 billion minutes a month chatting while playing games online. Vivox is popular since it has been able to offer users a high quality solution that they don't have to download seperately. The chat service is integrated into a number of games from companies like Wargaming.net, IMVU, Runewalker Entertainment, and Bigpoint.com. Just check out that graph...

Back in September we wrote about iControlPad dumping the dock connectors in favor of Bluetooth. The new iControlPad with Bluetooth is scheduled to ship February 16th. According to iControlPad's website, the gaming pad should work with any phone, console, or computer with Bluetooth. You just need to put in the right clamps to fit your phone, and go. You can even use it to charge your phone while playing games. Hey, multitasking!

Ashley Mitchell, a 29 year old IT business man plead guilty yesterday to stealing 400 billion Zynga poker chips. Though these were virtual chips, they are worth real money, about $12 million. Mitchell was able to sell about a third of them for £53,000 ($86,000). He hacked into the developer's servers and stole the chips some time between June 30, 2009 and September 7, 2009.

Gigabyte had more than one announcement to release at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The first, which focused on the company's first AMD FusionT Mini-ITX mainboard, was an announcement that plenty of PC builders and enthusiasts were excited for. The company's latest announcement at the event is geared specifically for gamers, and gamers who want to take their rigs seriously.

There are a few properties in the entertainment market that are expected to have huge releases. That includes the newest Call of Duty game, as well as the newest installment to the Gran Turismo franchise. Both of those games managed to sell a ridiculous amount of copies, with Call of Duty: Black Opsdestroying entertainment records on its own. One other franchise is just as anticipated, and when a new game launches, everyone knows that huge numbers are going to be racked up. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm didn't disappoint.

There's no doubt that publisher Activision has been on a bit of a roll as of late, especially with mega-hits like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and more recently, Call of Duty: Black Ops breaking records in the entertainment market. But, that's obviously not going to stop them from focusing on the future, and one way to make sure that you have a strong library of titles coming down the pipe is to secure strong developers. Bungie, the makers of Halo, were picked up by Activision not too long ago, and now it looks like Bungie's ready to go multi-platform, more than likely thanks to a big push from Activision.

A new high-end video card hit the market yesterday from NVIDIA called the GTX 580. With the coming of a new high-end video card, we all knew that shortly there would be hoards of new gaming rigs hitting the market using the video card and iBuyPower has now stepped up with three new offerings running the cool card.

When it comes to gaming computers more choice is always a good thing. Gaming PC maker iBUYPOWER has announced three new gaming desktops for gamers of all varieties that are interesting in the new AMD Radeon 6800 series video cards that launched last week.

It seems that the bigger you get in the gaming laptop market, the faster the beautiful aesthetics drop off. The new GSN801GAW gaming laptop from Lesance follows this trend, packing enough power in the features department for anyone looking for their next gaming laptop to give it a second look, but it certainly won't be winning any beauty pageants any time soon.

Origin have launched their brand new gaming notebook, the EON 17, sticking to the old adage, "You get what you pay for." Offering the customization options that PC/notebook gamers expect, plus throwing the kitchen sink into the deal as well, the EON 17's price tag will ecstatically showcase how much time and effort you're willing to put into designing your monster of a gaming notebook. With a price tag that starts at $2,499, you can expect that climbing the options ladder only sees significant increases to that price.